At my current client the systems dev I am managing is being done in eastern Europe. I am on calls with them every morning. ALL the developers are there.

Eastern Europeans have a culture of brainwork they never lost.

The problem with creating programming jobs in the US now is exactly the same problem that manufacturers in the rust belt now have in finding workers: finding workers with skills, who aren't on drugs, who want to work, who remember how to do the work, who understand and can fit into the culture of the workplace.

The loss of manufacturing jobs here in the midwest created a culture of not-working, welfare and meth. And even when candidates here are clean, they simply don't have any experience with the culture of manufacturing - those were their parent's and grandparent's jobs.

The same with programming. The US now lacks the institutional knowledge to support programming.

I was told by the IT industry to go fuck myself and starve and hah hah, I'm a loser who deserves to starve.

Someone like me with my experience should mentor the green talent. But I'm out of the field.

They have no mentors. Their potential mentors were driven out of employment 10+ years ago. The code camp types will flounder and pick up McJobs, their investments in many cases a waste.

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This is just more hysteria generated by the media. They have been saying this crap since the dot com. I dont buy it.

I have been in a bunch of companies in the NY metro area. Ask me how many young Americans I see in IT at any of these companies? ZERO as in NONE. I see armies of male H1Bs. I would like to know where all these people are going to be working because it sure as hell isnt going to be at any of the places I have been. I am talking variety of industries - pharma, telecom, banking, insurance. All had NO young Americans and many had no employees, all were contractors.

At my current client the systems dev I am managing is being done in eastern Europe. I am on calls with them every morning. ALL the developers are there.

We'd have to do some research to see how typical offshoring of big projects is. I'd think companies might feel a bit queasy about this because of all the overseas hackers.

Code built offshore needs to have an internal control process, like they have in accounting. I.e. another group should review the code for security flaws.

Regarding the idea of niche careers that Gorn mentioned, here's an idea: market yourself as an "IT security auditor" where your job is to review code for security flaws. You become an expert at using software security scanning tools. In order to establish yourself as an expert, you create a blog where you review the tools and publish results of running them against public domain source code.

Regarding code camps: they are a national jobs training program for the Information Age. Potential employees have to prove themselves through Darwinian competition whereby they have to not give up on their job search over a 2-year period after graduating.

The government must love code camps. No need for a Jobs Corps to train people.

The government must love code camps. No need for a Jobs Corps to train people.

The media feels good for promoting feel-good news. The local chamber of commerce shills and local government sponsored business development types who've never worked in a competitive business in their lives can take credit. The government can point to the thousand points of light and indirectly take credit for setting the right environment.To the simple minded blue collar and white trash prole public, STEM sounds like unqualified, promised money falling from the trees. "Yew know programmin. You'll be rich soon."

Everyone "wins." Low stupid proles hear what they want to hear. Government types can toast to their own genius.

It's like printing goodwill currency.

« Last Edit: August 26, 2015, 01:27:17 pm by The Gorn »

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The loss of manufacturing jobs here in the midwest created a culture of not-working, welfare and meth. And even when candidates here are clean, they simply don't have any experience with the culture of manufacturing - those were their parent's and grandparent's jobs.

That is a very interesting insight. Back then you had people who worked farms and such, working 7 days a week morning to night. Then the dustbowl and the depression came, and not having a job was a disaster! So a safety net goes in place. Then WWII and factory work, everyone working. Now their kids, that's us, are raised with TVs and refrigerators and maybe we don't have to get up at 4AM and work 3 hrs before school and 4 hours after to help dad slop the hogs and plow and whatever they did before.

So we have for the first time a culture of a lot of people who have never worked and don't see any value in it, not when there are sexting apps and meth for the taking.

This is just more hysteria generated by the media. They have been saying this crap since the dot com. I dont buy it.

I have been in a bunch of companies in the NY metro area. Ask me how many young Americans I see in IT at any of these companies? ZERO as in NONE. I see armies of male H1Bs. I would like to know where all these people are going to be working because it sure as hell isnt going to be at any of the places I have been. I am talking variety of industries - pharma, telecom, banking, insurance. All had NO young Americans and many had no employees, all were contractors.

At my current client the systems dev I am managing is being done in eastern Europe. I am on calls with them every morning. ALL the developers are there.

We'd have to do some research to see how typical offshoring of big projects is. I'd think companies might feel a bit queasy about this because of all the overseas hackers.

Code built offshore needs to have an internal control process, like they have in accounting. I.e. another group should review the code for security flaws.

Regarding the idea of niche careers that Gorn mentioned, here's an idea: market yourself as an "IT security auditor" where your job is to review code for security flaws. You become an expert at using software security scanning tools. In order to establish yourself as an expert, you create a blog where you review the tools and publish results of running them against public domain source code.

Regarding code camps: they are a national jobs training program for the Information Age. Potential employees have to prove themselves through Darwinian competition whereby they have to not give up on their job search over a 2-year period after graduating.

The government must love code camps. No need for a Jobs Corps to train people.

Every place I have been the majority of developers are offshore now. Have been for 10 years already. And they are still shifting jobs there. At the place I am now they laid off a bunch of people in the winter and moved all the jobs offshore. Despite all the stuff about the hackers its full speed ahead. The places they are sending stuff include China, eastern Europe and India.

My friend whom is a security guy was going to get into the code reviewing thing. Its a tough apparently. They use tools to scan the code and try to spot security vulnerabilities. Its get flagged and than they go through it by hand. The problem with security jobs in general is they only ramp up when after an event. Companies are always loathe to spend on it and they are offshoring those jobs too…..

A better way to describe it would be a con to get people to spend money on the hopes that they get a job. I have met a bunch of people who have gone to these boot camps and never were able to make it. The media is still spinning it that IT jobs is the wave of the future and how there is such a shortage of people. NO IT IS ISNT and we all know it. This is just pure propaganda designed to get your money.

For the sake of argument even if these jobs do exist, how many people have the mental aptitude to do the work? You don't just wake up one day and decide to be a programmer. When I was young almost everyone started as a programmer. Within 3-4 years at most the majority (like 80-90%) of them had bailed out into other areas. They became analysts, administrators, etc….

You ever heard those stories about the Gold Rush - the people that made the money were not the miners but rather the people who sold the miners the tools. Today the people that make the money are not the programmers but the people that live off the programmers - people that own apartments, these tech schools, food catering and others.

Maybe I am misreading the job market but I am not seeing the huge demand for IT people that the media is making it out to be.

The link was in a LinkedIn article where the author (who is a founder at Praxis) downtalks college as being a shitty investment if you don't know what you want to do. Instead, he recommends "real-world" demonstrations of the sort his company offers.

There sure are a lot of these companies which promise that "you too can be a web developer". Udacity is another one.

If you don't want to go to college, why not consider a building trade instead of being a web developer where you have to sit all day and fiddle with code? It can easily be outsourced and you have hundreds of thousands of people wanting to do the same thing.

"Being a web developer" is a job market hype equivalent of the dot.com bubble.

Those are interesting numbers. Web developer pays a bit more than steamfitter, it seems web developer is lower than development in general which I am fairly sure pays more than 62k on average.

Usually have to do an apprenticeship to be a plumber or steamfitter.

So you'd think developer is the obvious choice.

However, I suspect that if you do your steamfitter training you have a 100% chance of being hired immediately followed by lifetime employment under a strong union that ensures you get hefty benefits and a pension.

If you do the developer training, you're out a bunch of money and what's the hiring rate of bootcamp grads? Is it more than 10% of them that actually can get hired after that? Also you can only get hired if you would have been a good developer anyway. If you are a dummy your classes will not help you. But if you are a dummy and learn steamfitting, you have a good job, no problems, intelligence is irrelevant.

A steam fitter can not be outsourced to Vietnam on a moment's notice. It takes significant effort to move the factory. It takes almost no time to outsource programming.

I just did a quick search. The average C# programmer in Vietnam gets 8,300,000 VND a month which is about $370 US. That resolves down to about $2.10 / hour. And they have high speed Internet delivery of that code to your customer.

The only way to compete with that cost advantage is to provide something other than raw code. Either you are providing a body that can be ordered around or you are providing a service that can not be outsourced.

Ignorance and corruption play important roles not only in the IT industry but in our entire capitalistic economy. Whether a particular person believes coding or software development in general is easy or hard is sort of irrelevant. What really matters is what do the purse string holders want and believe. The trend in countries such as the UK and USA has been to send as much of the software work as possible to low cost countries such as the one that poster David Randolph mentioned in his post. I see this trend continuing rather than declining or going away.

The one thing that most trade jobs have in common with software development is the possibility of being laid off when work slows down. The upside of being a plumber or an electrician is that your skill-set is applicable in all geographical locations within the USA. In other words, construction work has been pretty much compartmentalized and standardized.

There are primarily two problems with having a software development job:• The low barriers to entry• and there is no well established entry route into the profession.

Do a Google search on how to become a doctor, dentist, pharmacist, or a lawyer. There are well established series of steps to a recognized professional qualification. If you complete the steps, you become a recognized member of one of those professions. Note: I am not saying that it is easy to become a doctor, but there’s little doubt about how to go about it. Now Google for ‘how to become a software developer’, the results will be full of vague platitudes such as ‘learn a programming language’, ‘contribute to an open source project’, ‘join a local programming group’. No clear career path, no guarantees about when and if you will be considered a professional and get access to those high-paying jobs of the future.

If you are considered to be a smart person who has done well at school and you are given the following career choice to make (see below) which path would you choose?

Choice #1Let’s take medicine for example, you follow these clearly enumerated steps, which are demanding but at the end you will have a high-status, high paying job.

Choice #2Learn some stuff by yourself. Note nobody agrees on exactly what a person should be learning. Attempt to get a junior, low status job, and then just keep learning more stuff. No guarantees that there’s a well paying job while you are doing all of this learning. For the rest of your life you must keep attempting to work your way up to better paying gigs. Oh, and during this whole process you will often be viewed as a bit of a social misfit as well.

The really important point not really emphasized in this thread:Software development is now a commodity business.You've gotta compete with all of the "mudmen" that are working at low wages.Important: Making the determination of quality software vs. crap software is not easy....so many companies just look at the wage and not at the quality.It's a big mistake, but it is WHAT IT IS: a crap business to be in....thanks to the H1-B visa program.

If I had the chance, I would be in the healthcare industry in a heart-beat.Sadly, I am too old to make the transition.